Written by

CAROLINE MADDEN

Mary Huhmann leads her vocal students in a song.

Students who attend Performing Arts Academy come here to learn crafts about which they are passionate.

"In high school, they teach you the absolute generics and the basics," says acting teacher Anthony Ciccotelli of Toms River. "Everything that I teach my students now is from my college experiences."

PAA students must major in acting, singing or dancing — but that isn't what they do every day.

"Some days are spent learning about theater history or technical theater," says acting major Andrew Landsman, 14, a freshman from Brick.

Other days are spent on the backbone of their major — history and technique to build on the actual performance aspect.

Acting majors learn theater history from its birth with the Greeks, through Shakespeare and continuing to today. Sophomores currently are learning Shakespearean monologues. Last year, the school produced "Hamlet" as part of PAA's commitment to training in Shakespeare.

Students also study the techniques of such reknown acting teachers as Constatin Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. "We certainly learn more than we would at any other elementary or high school," says sophomore Laurel Delany, 15, of Brick "We have the opportunity of learning Stanislavski while people in college are being introduced to it."

Vocal majors take more than 10 different classes, including physiology, posture, how to breathe correctly, music theory, piano, international phonetics alphabet (based on the Latin alphabet, it is a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language) and music history.

They study composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. And they learn to sing in other languages.

"Learning how to sing in Italian and German looks great on a resume for college," says Brittany Santos, 17, a senior vocal major from Toms River.

Dance majors do more physical work and learn many different ways to exercise and warm up. Keeping their bodies in shape is essential for students, and by studying anatomy they learn how to do that. They also study different dance types, such as ballet, modern, jazz and musical theater as well as the history of dance.

"I've learned that dancing is not all about tricks and turns," says senior Kimberly Bressi, 18, of Jackson. "It's an art form.

"There's more to it than what it is visually. We have learned how the history has brought dance to what it is today."

Students take what they learn and apply it to to the real world.

"We have learned the etiquette for auditions, how to introduce ourself, how to dress," says Ilana Bolotsky, 17, a senior vocal major from Toms River. "This also helps with our college auditions."

Vocal majors learn how to cut full songs into a 16-bar cut, a shorter version of the song appropriate for auditions.

"Coming to this school has helped me learn so much about my major, whether it is on paper or actually performing," says Amanda Gallagher, 15, a vocal major from Toms River.